Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Where's Your Hood?

In maps (as in life) boundaries can be fluid entities. This seems especially true when considering local neighborhood boundaries, where it can be very difficult to find even two people who agree on the borders of their local neighborhoods.

DNAInfo hopes to settle the argument over the exact position of New York neighborhoods by crowdsourcing the definition of neighborhood boundaries. Where Exactly is Your Neighborhood allows anyone to pick a New York neighborhood and then draw the neighborhood boundary on top of a Leaflet map.

Once you have drawn where you think your neighborhood's border lies on the map you can compare your neighborhood boundary with those submitted by other New Yorkers.

Where Exactly is Your Neighborhood could well have been inspired by a similar project carried out in LA by the Los Angeles Times.

In Los Angeles the boundary of the city's Eastside neighborhood is
particularly hard to define because there seems to be no official map of
the area's extent. The Los Angeles Times therefore decided to settle
the argument by asking their readers to draw Eastside on a map.

On the L.A.'s Eastside: Where do you draw the line? map
you can use the Leaflet drawing tools to draw your idea of where
Eastside's boundaries lie. You can then compare your concept of the
neighborhood with the view of the Los Angleles Times and with the views
of other readers.

Bostonography was
probably the first website to try and crowdsource neighborhood
boundaries, with their project to find out where residents believe
Boston's neighborhood boundaries lie.

The project uses a Google Maps tool
to allow participants to draw on a Google Map where they think
Boston neighborhood boundaries run. This has allowed Bostonography to
create a map of all the amalgamated responses so far.

The results for each neighborhood are also being analysed to see which
neighborhood boundaries participants have a strong agreement about and
to highlight areas where there are contradictory opinions about which
neighborhood they belong to.

The Neighborhoods Mapping Project
wants you to forget about what Google & Apple maps tell you about
your local communities and instead map your own neighborhood boudaries. The
result is a crowdsourced map of Portland, Seattle and Vancouver
neighborhoods.

No names or boundaries are included in the initial map view of each
city. Local citizens can therefore map their own ideas about their local
neighborhoods. To start adding neighborhoods to the map just click on
the 'start mapping' button. You can then use the drawing tools to draw
around a neighborhood on the map. When you have finished your
neighborhood boundary you can name the area and give it a description.

Once you've finished drawing your neighborhoods on the map (or if you
just want to see what other people have mapped) you can select the 'view
maps' option. Do this and the crowdsourced neighborhoods will be
outlined on the map. Click on an area on the map and you can read what
others have called the neighborhood and how they define the area.

If you don't live in Portland, Seattle or Vancouver you can always start your own crowdsourced neighborhood map by forking the project on GitHub.

The Neighborhoods Project
is another experiment in crowdsourcing US neighborhood polygons. The
Neighborhoods Project allows developers to download neighborhood
boundaries for every city in the US derived from geotags on Flickr
photos.

Users can also edit the Flickr derived boundaries and download a custom
GeoJSON with the edits applied. Edits to the boundaries are then fed
back into the overall results to help improve the boundary data.